His birthday had rarely been a nice day for Harry Potter, and frequently it was a rather rotten one. The first few times, once he was old enough to understand what he was being denied, he cried. Not that Aunt Petunia showed much sympathy with her shrill rebukes. Eventually the sting of not celebrating his birthday eased to a milder sadness. But then last year was different. A giant of a man broke down the door to the shack they'd run to, told Harry he was a wizard, and opened up a whole new world for him. Harry hadn't minded the squashed cake Hagrid, the giant, had made; it had already become the best birthday he ever had. The year that had followed was almost like a mad dream. He started at a new, magical school with strange new subjects, made friends that his cousin Dudley couldn't drive off, and gotten mixed up in adventures involving a cerberus, a dragon, a unicorn, and the only-mostly-dead killer of his parents whom Harry had defeated, again, to keep a powerful magical artifact safe.
It had been so crazy that after weeks of no contact with his new friends he worried that he had in fact gone barmy, only for his snowy owl, Hedwig, to remind him otherwise by her presence. So he held out hope that come his birthday he would finally make contact with the wizarding world again.
He had, but not in a good way. A strange house elf had shown up, and it all went downhill from there to this moment, as he watched Aunt Petunia's pudding come crashing down in the middle of their dinner party.
It splattered, covering the table and the people who were left spluttering from the sugary mess.